4. Resource allowance

The growing complexity of manufacturing systems and their controls, and the ever-increasing cost of their components (CNC machines, wire-guided forklifts, robots, etc.) have made it necessary to reinforce the evaluation and optimization of system behavior during the design phase.

During this stage, it is necessary to define the resources or work-in-progress to be used (transport pallets, for example) in order to be able to produce the desired output, of good quality and, above all, at the most competitive cost price possible.

The number of work-in-process reflects the productivity of a system, since an insufficient number of work-in-process does not achieve the desired performance. However, too much WIP increases production costs, as these parts use up inventory or transport media.

In this section, we focus on a...